Krita Manual

Krita Questions? Want to dig deeper? Read the Krita site for documentation for the upcoming Krita 3.

Introduction

Krita is a free and cross-platform creativity application for digital painting, image manipulation, concept art, comics and the creation of textures for things like game art or 3D models. It is designed around existing real-world painting materials and artist workflows, but it is also packed with functions digital artists require, like layers, filters, vector-based path drawing, typography tools, and built-in color-management support. Krita is a KDE application based on the Calligra platform.

Features

Designed specifically for artists, to promote natural drawing and painting workflows

Unique "Artist Palette" with color wheel, color history and favorite brushes is available with right-click

Interface

Krita has a highly flexible and user-friendly interface. Nearly all aspects of the interface, including the toolbar, keyboard shortcuts and specific tool options through the movable tabbed panels, or Dockers can be customized to suit the specific needs of an individual or team. Dockers are panels that can be moved around the screen through familiar drag-and-drop gestures. Using these tools a personally customized task-based workspace can be created in minutes. Each workspace can be uniquely named, saved and recalled for later use. When combined with the right-click accessible Artist Palette pop-up, an artist can create a seamless experience customized specifically to their needs, whether it is project-based or based more on personal workflow requirements.

Toolbars

Krita allows users to easily right-click and customize its toolbars. There are two toolbars in Krita: "Files" toolbar and "Brushes and Stuff" toolbar. You may add or remove whatever functions of the toolbars, change text position, icon size and order. Texts on the button can be changed or even overlapped by assigning any desirable icons to them (with KDE plasma workspace installed). While customizing toolbars, the function list is searchable.

Shortcuts

A powerful feature in Krita is the ability to assign/reassign keyboard shortcuts. The user is encouraged to assign both the main shortcut and an alternative shortcut to a single command. While customizing shortcuts, the command list is searchable and the users is notified of any conflicting commands.

Krita lets you set up shortcuts that both speed your own workflow, emulate another software package or, perhaps, both.

Dockers

Dockers are movable panels that each contain a specific set of tools. They are moved around the screen using familiar drag-and-drop gestures and can be placed either floating directly on the canvas or docked in one of the multiple docking areas. Dockers may be sized horizontally and vertically. Multiple dockers can be grouped in a shared space and switched between them by clicking on their tabs. By right-clicking on the title area of any panels you can easily add or remove panels from a complete list. A docker can also be collapsed to save space by clicking on its down arrow in the upper left corner.

Palette

There are two kinds of palettes in Krita: the ordinary palette for color presets (Color Preset Docker), and the not-so-ordinary Artist Palette pop-up used for quick access to color selector, color history and favorite brushes. This quick access palette can be called up by right-clicking anywhere on the canvas, which liberates the artist from the interruption in switching among colors and tools, thus providing a more immersive user experience. Favorite brushes can be added to the palette by clicking on the toolbar button Save to Palette, as well as selecting from any number of tag-based group of brush sets.

Brush System

Krita has a powerful and highly customizable brush system modeled on various existing real-world drawing tools. In brush settings different genres of tools are grouped separately, each of them has tens of specified options which allow artists to adjust them thoroughly. On the right-side of the brush setting window is a sketchpad where you may test the current brush settings. The background color and sketchpad gradient can be altered by clicking the icons beneath it.

While using the brush tool ("Paint with brushes" in toolbox), you may change brush size by holding Shift and drag brush-tip horizontally on the canvas. By holding Ctrl you temporarily switch to color-picker. By holding middle-mouse button you can move canvas. Right-click for the quick palette. Quick sliders of Opacity, Flow and Size can be found on Krita's brush toolbar, while only two can be shown at the same time, you may click the plus button on the right to switch between different sliders.

Stable Brushes

Pixel (Normal) brushes

Smudge brushes

Duplicate brushes

Filter brushes

Hairy brushes

Hatching brushes

Experimental Brushes

Chalk brushes

Color Smudge brushes

Curve brushes

Deform brushes

Dyna (Dynamic) brushes

Experiment brushes

Grid brushes

Particle brushes

Sketch brushes

Spray brushes

Supported File Formats

The following file formats can be opened directly by Krita. However, you can only save directly to native supported formats. Use export to save files in formats which are not natively supported. Depending on your operating system and building environment, some file formats may not be supported.